All posts tagged productivity

Sweden is a tiny country, yet it has the second-highest share of multinational companies per capita in the world. That can give its corporate sector—and the families who founded it—outsize influence in global matters. And the Wallenberg clan, one of Scandinavia’s richest, is often at the front of the line.

Jacob Wallenberg on Wednesday aimed that influence directly at European policy makers he sees as obstructing progress. Striking a bit of a frustrated tone, he said business is good, but Europe’s recovery is limping. Public leaders must move faster to address structural problems in the region and avoid burdening companies with unnecessary regulation, such as its planned new limits on bank board memberships. Read More »

In a bid to make them work more efficiently and effectively, the Italian maker of luxury sports cars and Formula 1 racers has a new email policy. Aimed at limiting the endless chain of reply-all emails that are a curse of office life, the new rule is pretty simple: An internal email can only be sent to a maximum of three people. According to a statement by the company:

“The injudicious sending of emails with dozens of recipients often on subjects with no relevance to most of the latter is one of the main causes of time wastage and inefficiency in the average working day in business.

Ferrari has therefore decided to nip the problem in the bud by issuing a very clear and simple instruction to its employees: talk to each other more and write less.”

By so doing, Ferrari’s chairman, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, hopes everyone from marketing to human resources will think twice before sending one, according to a spokesman.

He’d prefer to have them resolve issues by picking up the phone or getting up from their desk and talk to the colleague concerned.

“Montezemolo has always said that, at Ferrari, we take a decision at nine o’clock and execute it at nine-thirty,” he said.

Based in the town of Maranello just north of Bologna, the brand behind cars like the FF and 458 Spider has a staff of some 3,000. Half of them, however, are too busy working on the cars to write or read emails.

The limit, imposed on Wednesday, doesn’t apply to those sent outside the company.

In May, Mr. Cordero di Montezemolo announced Ferrari’s intention to sell fewer cars in 2013 despite having enjoyed record sales last year because he wanted to preserve the exclusivity of the brand’s image. Read More »